Sometimes, I think Zawinski just might be right.

Jason Stephenson jason at sigio.com
Sun Jun 19 13:24:00 EDT 2005


Why is printing such a pain? To be fair, this is not an issue I have 
with just Linux or FreeBSD or Unix. I have always found printing to be a 
pain. It's like real voodoo to me. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. 
Particularly in DOS, and sometimes in Windows, too. The only platform 
where I've never had any real problems printing: the Macintosh.

I installed AbiWord. I've used it off and on for what little "word 
processing" I do  over the course of the last five years. The current 
version doesn't print on my computer. If I try to print from Abiword, 
something is created and sent to my printer, but my printer just sits 
there blinking its light for five minutes or so before giving up.

If I have Abiword print to a postscript file, the same thing happens if 
I try to print the postscript. If I run it through ghostscript, there 
are errors.

If I convert Abiword's postscript output to PDF and try to print the 
PDF, I get the same result as if I hadn't converted it. I can view it 
just fine in xpdf, but it won't print from xpdf nor from ghostscript.

The trouble isn't my printer, nor its configuration. It prints other 
postscript documents just fine, and can print from other applications, 
mozilla for instance. Xpdf also has printed every PDF that I've opened 
with it up until now, and it still prints other PDFs, just not the ones 
that were originally edited in AbiWord.

I'm somewhat inclined to blame fontconfig, but I'm not sure, really.

Now, the question is, do I go to the bother of installing Open Office 
just because I occasionally need to print some word processed document? 
Or, do I just redo everything in TeX?

Right now, I'm inclined to ask, along with Jamie Zawinski, "What year is 
this?" Why is this stuff such a pain, and do I really want to put up 
with this?



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